Being the new news director at a TV station is not unlike being named a new coach on a football or baseball team. You inherit the team as is; some of its members have been there a long time and seen other coaches come and go. Some of the team may be less experienced and […]
Being the new news director at a TV station is not unlike being named a new coach on a football or baseball team.
You inherit the team as is; some of its members have been there a long time and seen other coaches come and go. Some of the team may be less experienced and are hungry for leadership.
You don’t play on the field, but you’re expected to improve the results right away.
Casey Clark was named the news director at Hubbard’s NBC affil WHEC Rochester, N.Y., in August. In the just-completed November ratings period, WHEC’s 5-7 a.m. morning news block was No. 1 in adults 25-54 in both rating and share, moving up from third place in November 2015.
When viewership grows for a local news program, explaining why or how it grew remains elusive. Is it a measurement anomaly? A change in talent, news coverage content, attitude or promotion?
Or was everything already in place and the audience is just finding it?
Whatever the reason, nothing instills confidence in a new coach like when the team gets an early win.
So I asked Clark why he thinks the news audience share on WHEC is up overall by 43% from last year.
“When I arrived at the end of August, I realized the people in the room knew what they were doing. We have a great group. The newscasts play much bigger than market 76. I am a big believer in laying out the vision, explaining how we are going to get there and then trusting my team to make it happen. Trust was a big issue when I arrived. The newsroom needed to learn to trust me and, more importantly, they needed to trust themselves. They knew what to do, but were gun-shy to do it without permission. Now they know taking risks is not only okay, but encouraged. Mistakes are not career ending, but learning opportunities (I make them all the time).
“One example of great risk taking. For election night, my assistant news director, Dave Overacker, pitched the idea of making our coverage look like CNN. We have all the video walls around us. Hubbard Broadcasting just invested in a new set and new control room, so why not! We subdivided our control room into two halves. The front produced the people; the back produced the studio visual environment. Then we added a Facebook Live camera to the control room and tasked our sports anchor to do play-by-play over the Facebook live feed, explaining what was happening in the control room. It was a HUGE stretch by the whole station and came off flawlessly. Best of all, it broke the cultural shackles that existed before.”
You can watch WHEC’s Facebook Live post of the control room by clicking here.
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